Useful tips for planning a trip to Japan

Japan is a fascinating country and planning a trip here could get off to a handsome start using this set of recommended links and resources.Please check out our article on the Japan National Tourist Organization as they have some superb resources for both planning and information. The links below offer up by no means any kind of authoratative list. They are just a few that we like the look of and have used ourselves.

If you have any suggestions for other links we should have here on this page, drop us a line using our contact page. Thanks.

General Resources for Travel To and Information About Japan

• The Japan Travel Centre, Picadilly, London - nice basic information, flight booking, train tickets, simple and easy to use website with friendly staff at the other end.
• The Japan Guide - acres of useful information about travel but also about all aspects of Japanese life and culture.
• Japan National Tourism Guide - part of the Japan National Tourist Organisation [JNTO] set of sites.
• The Japan National Tourist Organisation

Transportation Inside Japan

• The Japan Rail Pass - details about this most excellent of travel tickets, enabling you to travel on all of the JR network for either one or two weeks.
• The Tokyo Metro -English pages for information about getting around Tokyo on the underground trains.
• Haneda Airport - Tokyo’s city-centre airport, serving domestic destinations andthose in neighbouring Asian countries.
• Narita International Airport
• Airport Limousine Buses - getting from Narita to Tokyo can be a pain and expensive on the trains. A limousine bus is the way we always do it. Cheap, easy, goes to loads of Tokyo city centre locations.
• Kansai Airport - near Kobe and serving lots of domestic and international destinations. Plus, floating as it does out in the bay, a technical marvel!
• New Chitose Airport, Sapporo, Hokkaido - the main airport on the island.
• Japan Rail official website.
• JNTO’s excellent transport pages.

Miscellaneous sites in and about Japan that we like:

• Japan on Wikipedia.
• The Lonely Planet Guide to Japan.
• The Japan Times newspaper.
• Japan Today - English language news site in Japan. The message boards are a bit on the ‘negative foreign opinion’ side but the site has some good news on it that youhaveto scratch around for in Japan otherwise.
• The Japan Meteorological Office.
• Metropolis - Tokyo’s premier English language magazine.
• Asoboo - great networking site for people in Japan, thinking of visiting or thinking of moving here. For the artistic and creatively minded of you out there.
• Trends in Japan - awesome blog charting all the trends. Very worth visiting. You will be hooked. You have been warned!
• Photos by Alfie Goodrich - the photography website of Japanorama’s editor and prolific photographer. There are loads of photographs of Japan, especially Tokyo, and Alife is out and about almost every day shooting new pictures. Plus there is a live feed on his site from his photo-blog on Flickr, so you can keep up to date with all his new photos.

Remember, this list is by no means meant to represent the ‘be all and end all’. If you have a link you would like to see on this page, drop us a line via our contact page. Thanks.

Here are some of Alfie’s latest photographs of Japan, from Flickr:

[flickr ]tag:japan@Alfie in Japan(thumb, 24)[/flickr]